Lately I’ve been more concentrating on the evolution of Haexagon Concepts, but nevertheless, in the past 2 months, did shoot 2 short films (and part of another).

Haexagon is the latest of those 3 projects, but the first where I can post some information.

The project was directed by Marco Sparmberg, and the story goes a little like this:

“In a near future, China‘s society has developed a critical demographic imbalance. The number of male Chinese has increased rapidly. Women become a minority. Human reproduction is taken over by scientists and cloning laboratories. A greedy subculture emerges, taking advantage of this situation. Ruled by a private conglomerate called the Hæxagon Corporation, the market for selling the pleasure of a woman for one night to desperate men is a monopoly. The price for this exquisite virtue are the men’s lives!

Set out on the remaining remote archipelago of destroyed and flooded Hong Kong, men in groups of three have to compete against each other within a brutal fight of survival. The trophy, a single woman inside a secret compound. Only the last survivor is granted access to this underground facility at a large water reservoir in the island’s center. As winner of this fierce contest he can do whatever he wants with the woman, for one night only.”

It was shot on DSLR‘s, all Canon’s, on the 60D (All the daylight imagery), 5D and 7D (night/dark scenes), due to the versatility of the cameras (lightweight, easy to command and great for run and gun), budget constraints and a tight schedule.
The project was shot in and around Hong Kong, taking advantage of the wilderness and crazy/unusual places found all over the area (for a deeper look on the locations, check this out – http://www.flickr.com/photos/medienmarco/collections/72157627674625794/).

Here follows the first teaser of the project, that will be making the festival rounds, after its completion in April.

True Legend and The Lost Bladesman, although coming from two very different cinematographers, come from the same production country/market (Hong Kong/China) and came out within a year of each other. Nevertheless, they are two very similar movies in terms of color, grading, hue/saturation and even overall visual style.

Thematically the two movies are close, one is a Chinese legend/myth, the other, fictional musings of possible past events. They are both set in ancient China and both have a large component of martial arts and ancient theatricality. Visually though, they’re mostly indistinguishable and that’s their biggest flaw. The movies are shot as though there was some discoloration of the palette of their colors, as though there was some desaturation of the image because of the time they were presented, the problem is, that this discoloration is simply random/unrefined.

Every color is almost a pastel of itself, making them blend into each other, True Legend taking a more earthy tone and The Lost Bladesman, having a more bluish hue to the image. Every color that is, except red. The reds pop out. They are exuberant but, instead of creating a sense of confluity in the image, or even, of being a target color, their tone is so pushed into the pink, that at times, the color just becomes silly. Blood looks like someone chewed some cherry bubblegum and smeared it in the face of the actors, and the red clothes, more often than not, almost look like African clay sculptures (even if that was the point, or even to implement a sense of historical background, then the red would take an earthy tone too not breaking with the idea that the image is older than normal, as it stands, it seems as though whomever colored the clothes/image, forgot that the Vermilion pigment not only was a royal color, but that it symbolised eternity and life – not the color in which every single goon or soldier should be slain in).

There are some seasonal shadings that look really nice on the screen (the fadings of Autumn in The Lost Bladesman and the coldness of morning in True Legend), but then are completely overtaken by light that seems out of place (and hence dilutes the colors, making them seem more modern than expected). Overall, the color correction seems a bit, rushed.

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Like the two movies reviewed before, Alien vs Ninja and Future X Cops , albeit both being very strange genre selections and with stories that tend to confuse (but that’s something for another type of conversation) end up suffering with the choice to maintain their color as untouched (no visual contamination between the spectrum) and in some situations as fake as possible (the idea is that it the color is created to appeal to a “futuristic” minded person digitizing some of the normal hues and pushing all the colors to make them look as shiny as possible).
This plasticky look is often associated with children’s movies, not because the movies themselves are childish or dumb (once again, story here is irrelevant), but because this type of color stimulation appeals to a broader audience (here film – as a mass production tool with the main objective to make money by over-stimulation of the audience, advertising effect over quality, shady techniques instead of actual filmic mastery), like cartoons or slapstick comedy, by bombarding them with the existence of color and their emotional pulls.

The problem with these movies is that the color is just simply over-saturated for the sake of “comical” effect, creating a tyring image that further confuses the audience into being attracted by the explosions, blood and comic relief, rather than paying attention to the movie itself (selective color correction has the intent to avert/attract the audience’s eyes/attention to wherever the filmmaker desires, if this effect is pushed to all the colors of the visual range, all the time, then the movie becomes the equivalent of a sugar rush when its seen, only to be followed by a strong, emotional and physical letdown after its consumed), and end up let down by the movie after they’ve seen it.

A Beautiful Life suffers from the “Summer Movie” syndrome of late, so well established by the American influence over what we see in the film theater between May and September every year.

Cold lights are blue (fluorescent), warm are yellow (almost orange at times), the sun is as white as possible and the night shots have a certain glow to them (wet city, soft focus shots, etc), but, amazingly, the actors skin color tends to become the same from shot to shot (an earthy beige with slashes of orange and soft cerise).

This type of color correction is a midway between a technicolor color skew and the Teal/Orange mix. A midway. Which means that throughout the movie, it itself becomes at times as inconsistent as the range of colors it portrays, looking more like we are watching a 70’s ad magazine instead of a present day set love story. The soft blues in the light make the male character seem weak at times and the pinks/beige used by the female character make her seem more like an archetypal whinny diva than a naive/world thorn socialite.

Nevertheless, it does look beautiful. A Beautiful Life as a frame by frame picture exhibition could perfectly reflect some of the problems we see in filmmaking nowadays but it’d never be a dull or even inexpressive exhibit. That’s exactly its problem. There’s too much happening in the image, too much manipulation, too many ideas floating around. Its a patterned correction, a commonly used color grading, beautiful for stills, tiring, flacid and common in filmic form.

A Beautiful Life is manipulative color correction at its best, the problem is, it detracts from the movie. We as an audience are constantly thinking – “Oh, they look so beautiful… Oh that’s a beautiful shot”, instead of actually watching the movie.

I will continue the analysis of very well developed Color Corrected Movies in the Asian market, concentrating in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Korea.

Detective Dee as an example is a tough sell. The movie was visually developed by one of the strongest and most prolific and esthetically consistant directors in Asia (if not the World) and had the help of not one, but two, very experienced Directors of Photography working in Hong Kong/China and as such, it would be natural to see in the movie a homogeneous and strictly planned visual style, but this, as anything in the film-making universe, has more to it.

The chromatic reality of the film is largely dependent on diffracted and blended golds and oranges, making the image, more often than not, almost glimmer with shine and glitter. The earth tones are colder and blander than usual and the blues and black, almost simultaneously converge into each other. Whites and greys are clean and controlled influences in the picture and when existent, red takes over the screen with its ultra saturated presence.

Light seems to fade in the frame and it looks effortless and shadows are almost unapparent, this makes everything look and feel as though we were inside an impressionistic pastel painting (here an amazing mastery over the “digital” look captured by the RedOne but ultimately coded into what almost seems to have been shot in film) and detach ourselves from the time and place in which the movie is portrayed, giving total confidence in the creators of the film to take us through this crazy adventure film.

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Under the Hawthorne Tree also beautifully masters the control over the color and the capture used to make the film, but it is radically different to Detective Dee in terms of chromatic frames.

Hawthorne Tree, even though color is beautifully captured during the film, is extremely toned down (comparing to other Zhang Yimou films), sometimes tonally almost resembling a 40’s/50’s documentary in terms of the momentary desaturation of some scenes (this helps in following the emotional pull created between the couple and hence elevate our connections to the two main characters), yellows have a golden quality to them and the browns, when apparent, flood the screen as though they weren’t such a commonly misperceived color. Green’s, greys and dark colors (especially dark blues, greens and blacks) blend each other, making it look like even thought the fields seem fertile, something is apparently wrong with the countryside. Even though its momentarily romantic, there’s a certain irreverence under the surface and this inconspicuous color manipulation, throughout the movie, clearly presents it visually in the screen (there are fertile and arid terrains, a beautiful dichotomy for the visually guided).

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As a great example of a complete overhaul of the image in a chromatic sense in Asian movies of present day filmmaking is The Stool Pigeon a 2010 Hong Kong production that even though it roots itself in present day reality (the colors, although pulled to, at times, a controlled surreality, are clearly colors that everyone sees and commonly associates to our day to day lives), the image varies and mutates all throughout the movie.

There are scenes with a washed out look, almost at a pasteled kodachrome film stock quality, making it look like something is unsafe, unfamiliar, unreal. There are moments were the lights are bright and intense, bringing a strong color profile to the characters in the screen (fluorescent lighting bring out the whiteness of the faces and in locations, the saturated blues), others are unsaturated and almost chromatically nonexistent.

Depending on the moment of the film, the color seems to shift to capture the character’s voyage but, amazingly, it is done so consistently that, at a certain point of the movie (around the 20 minute mark) it becomes apparent that the filmmaker has created a stylized heterogeneous but extremely well formatted movie.

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Monga and The Man from Nowhere, in terms of the construction of the frames in their movies is clearly at a different level from the previous examples, not as weaker movies but, as examples of what filmmakers strive to present as reliable and visually rooted in reality color corrected images. Both movies make the audience follow violence, friendship, betrayal and other hard to swallow themes, but instead of going to a artistic/differentiated poetic imagery composition, they both present what is happening as real, as we see it, as it is in our daily lives.

Punctually – lights, color, shadows, darks and lighter parts of the images seem too defined and sharp and these variations make the audience feel as though they are inside the images, inside what is happening, clearly being guided into adopting if not completely assimilating the story into their own existence. We are inside the world of the moving picture. The high definition, high quality, high detail picture, every one has gotten used too from capturing real moments with their phones, cameras, etc.

The Man from Nowhere makes a voyage from very dark lighting and hard shadows to a certain more relaxed, more human imagery towards the end, and Monga cleverly does the opposite in its balanced visual composition, becoming gradually more violent, more imbued with stronger, bolder visuals (in Man, although violence becomes all that we see in the screen, the character is portrayed as going to an extreme in his reality to save his friend, making us feel connected to him, in Monga, the opposite is what is true), controlling its colors and making us watch the decay of the images in front of us (the lighting doesn’t change but its warmer coloring when yellow and cooler tones when white are gradually more noticeable).

Through recent examples of good and bad (of course as everything, the term bad is relative to each and everyone’s sense of taste, but I’ll use it, hence forth, as a reference to the use of color correction in a way that doesn’t help increase the viewers or retain a well balanced movie, not making it a memorable or enjoyable piece of art/product), I will further demonstrate the U.S.’s influence over what has been done in Asia, and how, sometimes, that influence isn’t always beneficial to the receiving party.

Starting with good examples of how appropriate and how color correction increases some movies appeal on an audience, I have chosen the movies – Aftershock, Love in a Puff, Detective Dee, Under the Hawthorne Tree, The Stool Pigeon and Monga, The Man from Nowhere and 13 Assassins.

All of these movies are from the last 3 years (production and release) and are all from several countries from Asia (Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong). All have been shot on film or digital (with the Red, the Alexa or Panavision cameras, etc), and all have been shot by very different Directors and Cinematographers. Some are technically groundbreaking, others help the Asian market fight with its American and European counterparts at a level playing field for an enthusiastic but growingly judgmental audience.

Let us start with Aftershock.

The movie is set during the Great Tangshan Earthquake of 1976 to the “present day”, so, even thought its set in the recent past, the collective memory of the public is still highly influenced by photographic and video depictions (here by the quality of cameras existing in China at the time and not in the rest of the world) of that single event.

The movie is shot in an extremely somber grey/brown color palette with its main focus, the destruction evidenced by a catastrophic movement on the earth’s core and the somber reality lived by the family after the earthquake and the choices made during it.

This visual choice makes the image and story on the screen become stronger and more appealing to the public as they are not being visually manipulated into feeling excited or vulnerable or tired over seeing a devastating event and ensuing suffering through manipulative color aberrations.

Using earth tones and softer graded greys even helps the filmmakers in some scenes (where some of the effects or time transitions may feel artificial) get away with pretty much anything throughout the more dramatic/death infused scenes. This monotonic color scheme ends up hiding some otherwise evident mistakes as the audience isn’t being blasted by vibrant and distracting colors (if an explosion happens with vibrant reds, yellows and oranges, but isn’t to the liking of the audience, their attention is easily lost in unnecessary effects shots, or even necessary but unattainably better shots).

There isn’t any doubt why Aftershock did so well in the box office and dvd sales in Asia, as it is a very solidly constructed film, from its incisive story line to the evident control of every detail in color, cinematography and tone and its team’s decisions to make the movie more event grounded over visually “vibrantly” appealing.

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At the other side of the box office success pool we have Love in a Puff. The movie was in all accounts a disaster when it came out but, through very good word of mouth and reviews, the movie ended up making its fair amount of money to support its makers, becoming a weird conundrum in the Hong Kong internal movie market.

One of the most common reviews and criticisms (from professionals and viewers alike) was that the movie, even though it had its faults, it “spoke real” to people. This term is widely used when talking about documentaries and extremely visceral, dramatic movies, but Love in a Puff is a somewhat quirky comedy where smoke and the relationships ensuing over its, now recent, social persecution, takes the center stage.

The creators nonetheless, instead of adding immense quantities of smoke and making the image bland and with a small color differential (here maybe realizing that a flat approach on the color spectrum would surely repel the viewers, as the Hong Kong smog is itself already abundantly evident on a day by day basis), went in a different direction, and tried to make the movie color intuitive with a palette closer to the Technicolor scheme of the Kodak years, but toned slightly down (exuberant highlights but a color scheme that appreciates the colors instead of blowing them).

This decision, makes for simple, calm and perfectly lit scenes on the outside (here the white color of the sunlight and the clean darks of the city, make for a beautifully romantic city, where its main characters find companionship even in the supposed dark corners of the streets), and vibrant and soft coloring/lighting on the inside scenes (the purple, blue, black and grey, aren’t excessively contoured or selected in the frames, but are evidently apparent during the scenes, and make for a very appealing mise en scène).

These two examples, even though coming from different sides of the production reel, and from two “largely” different markets, showcase how a carefully controlled and decided color scheme/cinematography, further increase a movies possibilities over its fledgling although highly competitive markets.